BrianHelge.com

Renovating the main bath: Part 6 - Completion

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:09:41 -0500

It feels good. It feels really good to be done with the bathroom project. It's nice to just finally take a step back and look at everything that was done and know I don't have to work on it anymore ... I hope. The best part, is that it's completely done before Ben and Steph come up for the NCAA tournament. We'll actually have something to show off instead of saying, "please excuse the mess." Personally, I think Christi is more pumped to have her hallway back. It was kind of my catch-all place to dump all of my tools and extra things that I needed for the project.

A few people have looked at the before pictures and said the previous bathroom was in pretty good shape. While true, it didn't have a tiled floor and it was a lot of fun to just go out on whim and completely demo something without really knowing what I was getting myself into. It was a great learning experience if nothing else.

Now it's time to fill up on water and come over to, err, try out the new bathroom. If you want to just look from afar, here's what was done:

Over view picture.
Picture of the new light fixture, mirror and vanity that were installed.
The floating shelf that actually floats, as opposed to falling.
Close up of the new light fixture.
The new faucet.
Top of the vanity.
Vanity close up.

Renovating the main bath: Part 5 - Procrastination

Sun, 7 Mar 2010 11:22:13 -0500

The bathroom project was supposed to be a nice quick upgrade for the house. I originally planned on having everything completed within a two week window. Since Christi was back home for exactly two weeks, I figured this would be perfect. However, I started a week late, so I was only about seven days into the renovation when she came home. Not blaming her or anything, but when she came home, she just wanted us both to relax, so I took a few nights off of working on stuff. A few nights turned into a few weekends which turned into a few weeks.

In the meantime, since Christi more or less made me (once again, not blaming her here) buy the tile cutter, others found out that I knew how to tile. This was one of the first times in life when I really found out how contagious knowledge was. Pacino just bought a 3 family house and wanted to rip up the vinyl flooring in his kitchen and lay down some tile. So I spent pretty much one entire weekend helping him out. I'm glad I did because his kitchen looks amazing, but in terms of our house, it was time away from the bathroom. However, being that it's our second bath, I figured helping Pacino get his place into shape was a little higher on the priority chart.

I've been working on and off lazily over the past few weeks or so, but really kicked it back into gear about a few days ago. Everything was done. I was satisfied, but not entirely happy with everything. There was one final touch that was missing: a floating shelf on the wall. On one of our shopping trips at Target, I saw some there and picked one up to complete everything.

We left to go meet up for dinner with some friends and when we came back, the Humpty Dumpty effect came into place. Yes, all of the king's soldiers and all of the king's men couldn't put my floating shelf back together again.

The picture rundown:

The support where the floating shelf was supposed to go.
One of the decorative glass pieces broke on the tile when it hit the ground.
The shelf was chipped and cracked everywhere and completely useless.

Extreme Beer Fest 2010

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:04:10 -0500

On Saturday, a few of us from work drove up to Boston to meet up with Scott and attend Beer Advocate's Extreme Beer Fest. In short, brewers from around the region go crazy and show off beer that they have aged in whiskey/bourbon barrels, are filtered through orange peels, taste like key lime pie (which was awesome), etc. The great part is that you can sample an amazing sampling of beer, while the downside is that you will never be able to buy/taste any of these ever again.

Among the many highlights, including hearing a guy get called a "puddle" since he was too drunk, was sampling Pliny the Younger (image on right), the number one beer on BA as well as Sam Adams' Utopias, the strongest commercial beer in the world.

The other highlight had to be seeing five guys crash at Scott's parents house, including some with sleeping bags on the floor, and then waking up to his mom making breakfast for all of us in the morning. Besides all of us sitting around watching HGTV in our hungover state, it was as close to a flashback to high school as I might ever have ...

Renovating the main bath: Part 4 - Setbacks and delays

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 11:02:46 -0500

With most projects this size, you have to anticipate some stuff going wrong and the project not going as quickly as you first thought it would. A day after laying the tile, I can home from work to find one of them cracked. No reason, just sitting there cracked. The plan was to grout that night, but now since the tile cracked, I have to wait an additional 24 hours to make sure the mortar sets and this doesn't happen again.

Since I needed something to do in the meantime, I went to Home Depot or Lowes (I've been to so many, they are blurring together at this point) to cut some floor molding. Luckily, I found some that is very close to what is currently throughout the house. In these old colonial houses, you usually see thicker baseboard. To match the existing, the new ones are currently 5 1/4 inches tall. The widest mitre box that I could find was 5 inches wide. So, this means that tonight I'm going to be free handing 45 degree angles to hopefully get them to line up perfectly in the corners. If this doesn't work, which I'm more or less expecting it not to, we'll be changing the height of the molding.

Once again, here's what's going on:

The chair rails, which I still loathe, have caused more of problem than I anticipated since the wall is now indented because of them.
I've been patching them over and over to get them as smooth as possible.
The grout has been applied and the floor is completely done now.

After another coat of paint to where I patched the walls and figuring out a way to cut the base molding, I should be able to start putting things back into the bathroom and be done with it. The goal is by the end of the day on Friday, which is the two week mark, and what I promised to the wife.

Renovating the main bath: Part 3 - Tiling

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 13:00:00 -0500

I finally had another day where I felt very productive about the progress on the bathroom. I finally got to the point where I laid some tile and hopefully when I get home from work, everything will be set and there won't be any problems. With Christi out of town, I did have a little extra support at the house. Scott and Anne came over because ~~they both~~ Anne was extremely excited to learn how to tile. Luckily I was able to show them the process by laying a few down before we needed to cut around the pipes and toilet. I had not put together my new tile cutter (image on right) before they came over, so they were nice enough to spend some time in the garage with me helping me put it together. I told them that for the installation costs, Christi and I would come over and help them tile whatever they wanted as soon as their house hunting is over.

Why buy an expensive tile cutter when doing a bathroom the size of a closet? Well, your wife demands that you get one. I'm pretty sure this is a set up so that I have to tile every other project that she has in mind. We actually bought the tile through Lowe's, and they have free tile cutting there, but it's about a 15 minute drive each way and if I screwed something up, it would take me forever to keep running back and forth. Plus, with the gas and how I just buy everything in sight inside of a home improvement store (yes, you'll be able to see some receipts when the project is finished), I'm sure paying for it straight up was better than making all the trips.

Tiling takes a little bit of time, so in terms of pictures, there's not too much to see:

Seeing how noisy the tile cutter was, I was able to get most of the tile down before it got too late. There's just a few pieces to go.
All of the main cuts around the toilet and pipe are done.
The daunting task of tiling around and behind the radiator are still ahead ...

Renovating the main bath: Part 2 - More than I can chew?

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:00:00 -0500

Old houses are, well, old. There's really no other way you can say it. The trade off for having original hard wood floors from the 40s is that you're going to have a large plumbing pipe run right up your bathroom wall and part way into your baseboard (see image above). I had some plans of leaving the original baseboard in place so I could match the rest of the house, but because of how it was put down in some areas as opposed to others, there was no consistency with how our new vanity looks (don't hold your breath, it might be a while until we get to that post ...) and how the tile needs to be laid on the floor. So, I just took the rest of it out. I thought demo days were over, but there's always something else that needs to be done. This day didn't feel as productive as the first, but we're slowly moving in the right direction.

Here's the progress that was made:

I found a new way to stop my pipe from dripping water.
I sawed underneath the door frame to allow room for the tile.
A fresh coat of paint now covers up the sea foam/mint green that used to be there.
Tiles were roughly put down to get a sense of how the room will look when everything is in place.
Because of the unique tiles that Christi and I picked out, I have a lot of room for error when I grout. This will be extremely nice considering that the walls aren't exactly straight (see earlier where I talk about trade offs for an old house).

Renovating the main bath: Part 1 - Demo

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 13:30:00 -0500

Christi and I have always talked about renovating our main bath, by ourselves, but never really found the time or the motivation to start the project. So while she's in Nebraska for work for two weeks, I thought I would get the project going myself and see how much I could get done before she came home. *As a note to those reading this, Christi didn't mind the chair rail that went across the bathroom, but I did. Little did I know that this would be the toughest part of the project ... so far. As with the fish tape tutorial, hopefully I can teach some people out there the right things and wrong things to do when doing a project like this without professional help.

The bathroom isn't the biggest place in the world (about 7'x4'), so the pictures were a little tough to take, even with my 18mm lens on the Canon. If you can't see much from the pictures, this might be one of those you had to be here to know what's going on projects, and if you haven't been to our place, hopefully the first time you come over, you'll see a sweet new bathroom.

On to the process:

Take a bunch of pictures before you start in case you have to tell the contractor you hire that this is what it used to look like. Overviews here, here and here.
Have fun ripping everything off the wall, including the hideous chair rail, and then punch a fist size hole in the wall while removing ... the chair rail.
Crack open a beer, realize you have no clue what you're doing and call for expert advice.
Listen to your father, because he may or may not have experience in the subject, and get back to work.
Learn how to patch a hole by applying a wire mesh over it, filling the holes with wall compound, realizing everything will be alright and remind yourself to thank dad later.
Rip everything out of the bathroom. This includes the chair rail (yes!), shoe molding and base molding, vinyl floor, toilet and vanity. Then take the mirror off the wall and realize one of the previous owners did a horrible job patching a medicine cabinet and think of how great your hole repair job is compared to theirs.
Worry what you're going to do about it, and then realize you'll just buy a big mirror to cover it up and hope the next owner doesn't read this blog (it's really not that bad).
Take more overview pictures, here and here, to show off the sweet progress you've made in the first day.
Keep the injuries to a minimum by only slicing up a knuckle or two.

All in all it was a good day, and hopefully a lot more can get accomplished when I post the second part to this series.

Fishing in January

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 13:00:00 -0500

No, I didn't go to a tropical paradise (I wish) to go fishing at this time of year. No, we're not drilling holes in any lakes up here to go ice fishing. I'm talking about fish tape. This might be an instructional post to a few people reading this. I found out absolutely nobody in Connecticut knew what I was talking about when I told them about fish tape, and almost everyone in Nebraska knew what it was. Obviously, this isn't one of those regional pop/soda/coke type of debates, it's just that people didn't know what it was.

For those who don't, fish tape is made up of thin steel that allows you to thread it easily through walls. Most electricians use it, and most people named Brian Helge use it when they drop their surround sound speaker into the wall. As you can see from the image, there is no easy way to get a wire when you're hole is near the ceiling.

So, this is what you do:

Assess the hole and realize this is going to be extremely difficult to do by yourself.
Go into the basement and look at the ridiculously small hole that you have to work with.
Use electrical tape to secure the wire to the fish tape, feed it up the wall and brace the fish tape holder so it doesn't fall when you go upstairs.
Realize this is almost impossible with one person, so go a new route by dropping a weighted string and praying that you can grab it from the bottom.
Try both processes around 10-15 times with no luck, and then somehow, manage to get the two caught on each other and pull the string up.
Go to extreme measures to make sure the wire doesn't fall back down when you pull the fish tape back down through the floor.
Marvel at a job well done.

Best seats in the house

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 13:00:00 -0500

Who would've thought after working at ESPN this long, my parents would be more regulars on their programs than I am? I guess this really isn't shocking, as this has happened before. I'm just glad mom keeps showing off her ESPN gear.

We name all of Stanley's toys

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 13:00:00 -0500

Sitting alone eating dinner last night, I glanced down at the floor to notice the ridiculous amount of toys that Stanley piled up on our rug. Something that a lot of people don't know, is that we teach Stanley what the names of each of his toys are. I decided to shoot some video of something that Christi and I are used to doing every night:

The Pheasant (original toy that started the naming conventions):

Soccer Ball:

Go Big Red (we trained him to do this in a few days right before the Holiday Bowl):

I was on SportsCenter

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 13:00:00 -0500

Every year ESPN is kind enough to show all of their employees on one edition of SportsCenter right around Christmas.

That last minute Christmas gift

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 13:00:00 -0500

Been too busy the past 350 days and need a quick gift for that special someone on your Christmas list? Look no further than your local Target store. This year they are running a special on outside animal lawn ornaments that come complete with heart worm. I'm still shocked someone looked at this picture and thought it warranted it to be on the outside of the packaging ...

It's happening again

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 13:00:00 -0500

The last time that the Oakland Athletics were thinking about leaving town for a new ballpark, ~~one of~~ the greatest viral YouTube video of all time was released. In my opinion, of course. That's right ladies and gentlemen, it's time to throw the car in neutral and ghost ride da whip:

One of these things guys is not like the others ...

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 13:00:00 -0500

While Christi and I were hopelessly cheering on Suh to win the Heisman Saturday night, I saw something that was hilarious that the broadcasters were kind enough to not call out. Every year before the award is handed out, all of the past winners that are able to make it to the ceremony are invited on stage to serve as a backdrop before that year's winner is announced.

They start from left to right and go from the least recent winner to the most current one. The shot starts out showing six, yes six, winners from the 50's. That's amazing in it's own right. Then they get to '72 winner and show Johnny Rodgers striking a Heisman pose, which was a little cliche considering you're only surrounded by other winners. A few seconds later we get to '83 to see Mike Rozier still wearing his Halloween costume, or looking like a pimp, I really couldn't decide which was more appropriate. Don't get me wrong, I love to bask in the "glory days" of Nebraska's past winners, and Johnny is a strange character, but to see Rozier looking the way he did was unreal. We then move our way slowly towards the 90's and the more recent winners.

Looking through the crowd shots earlier that night, I did notice Eric Crouch looked normal, and almost like royalty compared to the other Husker winners, so I was glad they would end on a good note ... or so I thought. They finally get to the 2000 winners, and who's the only person standing there? The one and only Eric Crouch. And by one and only, I literally mean that he was the only guy standing there. At first I thought it was cool that he was honored by himself, but then I realized why he was standing all alone.

I turned to Christi and before I could end my question of "Why is he the only one out there?," I realized that everyone else was in the NFL and they had a game to prep for. Don't get me wrong, if I won the Heisman, I would be up on that stage every year as well, but I would hope it wouldn't be at the cost of it meaning my career was over that soon. It was just sad to realize why he stood by himself and the two of us wondered if anyone else noticed it as well.

I'm a little biased, but Crouch was a great college football player and, in my mind, deserved to win the award in a down year in '01. As long as Tebow doesn't score four rushing touchdowns in the Sugar Bowl, Crouch will still hold the all-time QB touchdown record with 59. A mark that might stand for a very long time to come.

About Suh: It was good to see that a defensive lineman was recognized for the award. I thought he had a great year, but I didn't think it was enough to justify giving him the Heisman. The truckload of other awards he won this year will hopefully suffice. However, the fact that he finished first in the Southwest Region (same region as Colt McCoy, who finished above him overall), that he beat out '07 winner Tebow and had the most 4th place votes of any Heisman finalist in the history of the award is absolutely outstanding.

Maybe not winning the Heisman isn't such a bad thing after all. With the NFL career that everyone is expecting him to have, he probably wouldn't have been able to come back and stand next to Crouch for a good twelve to fifteen years down the road.

It's been a while

Wed, 9 Dec 2009 13:00:00 -0500

A blog post has been way overdue and I usually start these lacking posts with something to the extent that I've been way too busy lately to write anything. Well, that's sort of been the case ... and I have pictures to prove it. Let's do a roundup, a la BVK style:

My assumptions were correct and I reassured myself that I'm not as tough as rugby players (even when we're playing flag football).
Christi and I had around twenty people at our house for an early Thanksgiving meal and I cooked my third turkey.
We went down to San Antonio to celebrate grandpa's 80th birthday.
While down there, I found out I'm becoming more like my dad every day as we wore the same shirt to the bar for the Husker game.
Saw the Alamo again, and was just as unimpressed as I was the first time.
Kept up our annual tradition of cutting down our own Christmas tree (Christi - Brian).
I'm wondering what I'm going to do with all of the leftover Tostitos our friends brought over in anticipation of going to the Fiesta Bowl with a win over Texas.
Met Magic Johnson.
Met Travis Pastrana.
And went back for the second year in a row to the Jimmy V Classic at MSG.

Yale v. Harvard at the Yale Bowl

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 13:00:00 -0500

I'm not quite sure what sparked the conversation a few months back, but somehow I was put in charge of organizing a trip to the annual Yale/Harvard game. Luckily enough, this year it was right down the street at the Yale Bowl in New Haven. To tell you the truth, I was shocked that the alumni of both schools actually allow a commoner like myself to be able to buy a whopping fifteen seats in a row to, more or less, try to dress like they do and enjoy ourselves in the company of some of our nation's most intelligent. I was talking to Christi and Nebraska home game or not, I can't remember a college football game where I've seen people buy tickets at the counter, let along empty seats in the stadium. At the same point, it's quite strange and quite sad.

Tailgating was the absolute highlight of the day. After we made our way through the "game day traffic," we pull into our spot and throw down the bean bag boards. The second we did that (and all throughout the day) people looked at us as if we were crazy, playing a game that they've never seen before. Besides throwing a football around, it might be the most popular game at a tailgate. After studying the people around us, we weren't shocked they have never heard of the game before. The Harvard group next to us pulled in with their Lexus and pulled out a table, table cloth, and started serving champagne on ice at 9am in the morning. I took a quick look back to our Jeep to see AP chugging a Bud Light and Restivo eating potatoes out of a plastic dish with a beer bottle cap since our plastic silverware hadn't arrived yet. I think at that point, you could clearly tell who dropped $50K per semester for their education and who dropped $50K for their degree.

We had such a blast tailgating that we didn't make it into the game until seven seconds left in the first half. Right as we get in, former Nebraska quarterback, Patrick Witt, misses one of his many passes on the day and Yale decides to go for a 62 yard field goal since they didn't trust the golden arm of Mr. Witt. Needless to say, none of us were holding our breath as the ball didn't even make it to the end zone.

After suffering through the third quarter, we're thinking it's almost time to ditch this poor attempt at what they call football and head back to the tailgate. Maybe it's because I hadn't lost enough of my voice yelling at Witt or maybe it was because we figured we better get some use out of our tickets (did I mention they were $15 and 15 rows up?), we stuck around until the end. Up until this point, we figured the Ivy Leaguers focused more on intellects than it did on X's and O's. This point couldn't have been more clear than when Yale was facing a 4th and 22 from their own 25 yard line with three minutes left and a three point lead. All they have to do is punt the ball away and deny a field goal attempt in the waning seconds. Is this what they do? Of course not. They run their fake punt formation, give the ball over on downs and watch the game slip through their fingers three plays later. I've watched a lot of football in my life, and that has to go down as one of the dumbest play calls that I've ever seen ... Ivy league football or real football.

Although the game didn't live up to the hype, we had a blast going down there and looked awesome doing it. Pics will hopefully be up after we get back from Thanksgiving down in San Antonio. Until then, you can check out Christi's Facebook page to see us in all of our glory.

Watching the Huskers ... on a Monday?

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:00:00 -0500

Just like How I Met Your Mother before it, Christi and I started watching The Big Bang Theory since it's pilot episode. We couldn't have been more glad we did as they rewarded us earlier this month.

For those not familiar with the show, the main female character, Penny, is originally from Nebraska trying to make it big as an actress in L.A. Every few episodes or so, they will bring up a small tie back to the midwest, and it's usually pretty good as we are able to relate with it every time. Until this episode where her friends from back home visited her and they all watched the Husker game at her apartment.

As sad as this sounds, it's probably the best non-sports Husker call out since ... Tommy Lee Goes To College (I can't believe I just wrote that). For those that don't know: Yes, Christi and I were both in college when he did his four week show there. Yes, Christi and I both saw him and met him. Yes, he's exactly how you think he'd be. No, surprisingly enough, we did not require any treatment or vaccination shots after our close encounters.

My first 911 call

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 13:00:00 -0500

I made my first 911 call yesterday. Thankfully it wasn't for myself or Christi.

We were on our way to see "2012." After seeing the movie, we realized if we had been involved in the crash, we really wouldn't have missed that much. Anyways, we were on the I-84 and took our exit to the theater. It's a pretty tight curve and we always joke about the exit since we once saw a woman driving in front of us with half of her car hanging on the ground. Light rain started falling about thirty minutes earlier, and when they tell you in diver's ed that's the worst time to be driving, they just received another accident to validate their case.

The red car in front of us just started on the turn and began to spin out. The lady tried to correct herself, hit the guard rail and spun out. I hit the brakes pretty hard to avoid crashing as I swerved to her left to get around her. At this time, the person behind me was following us way too close and swerved and hit the guard rail behind us. We pulled over, and the car behind us just drove away.

After putting the hazards on, I called 911 to report everything and it took me forever to convince the operator what exit we took. It was like she thought I was lying to her for some reason. After ~~she believed me~~ realized where I was at, I hung up and Christi and I wanted to make sure the woman in the red car didn't have any injuries. Christi was a little bit ahead of me and started walking towards her. At this point, a transport truck came barreling around the corner and had to throw on the breaks to avoid any other accidents (irony: always there for a good laugh after the fact). It all happened so quickly, but when he hit the breaks, he spun his truck sideways and wedged himself between the two walls. My initial reaction was it looked like the scene from Terminator 2 where the semi truck spins out of control.

So the picture above is if you would be going the wrong way down the exit. It's taken from the point of view of us walking back towards the accident. We waited ten minutes for the officer to show up and since no one hit anyone else, he said we were free to go and we just barely made the opening time for the movie. But as I mentioned above, it would have been a lot more interesting to see how they un-wedged the truck and got traffic flowing once again than sitting through two hours of that blockbuster. And it wouldn't have cost us twenty bucks.

Pumpkin carving on Halloween

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 13:00:00 -0500

Just as quickly as Halloween came this year, I realized I was once again behind on launching my website. Excuses this year will be work, freelance work, Christi and Stanley. Christi will probably just tell you I'm lazy, but I'm pretty sure that Stan is on my side.

The yearly tradition of carving pumpkins lives on. Christi masterfully demonstrated how she has no problem with the "difficult" templates while I decided to fire up Photoshop this year and make my own. I figured after Nebraska got back on track earlier that day, how could I pass up the opportunity to create a Husker pumpkin?

As for when the new site will go live, I think the soft launch date will be the week before Thanksgiving/Christi's birthday since we're going out of town that weekend. I'm hoping to wrap everything up in the next few weeks and get it out the door. For those die hard brianhelge.com fans out there (really, are there any?), you've stuck with a late launch before, so what's one more year?

Happy Halloween everyone.

My first NFL experience

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:00:00 -0500

Last Sunday, Christi and I braved the rain and cold weather with about ten other people to experience our first NFL game. Most people were shocked that neither one of us has ever been to a game (or an NBA or NHL game for that matter). On the flip side, we ran the math and unofficially I've been to more college football games than almost my whole team combined. It's just a different beast out here in the northeast.

There were a lot of obvious differences, but one of the main ones was how many men between the ages of 30-50 go absolutely crazy for their team. I'm not talking about the average joe sports fan, I'm talking about the guys who are just dressed to the nines in their Jets gear screaming at the top of their lungs and acting like a college frat kid the entire game. I can only imagine the wives of these guys sitting at home holding onto every calming second until the stench of $9 boos and $7 hot dogs stumbles through the doors. Don't get me wrong, "that guy" has been at every college football game I've been to, but it just seemed like he was everywhere at The Meadowlands.

Also, Christi pointed out that it was strange to see empty seats at a game. Thinking about it, I can't remember a time, including away and bowl games, that I didn't watch football with every seat being occupied.

The game wasn't the best, but we were two minutes and forty-four seconds away from an NFL rarity in the form of overtime. It would have been pretty sweet to say that the only NFL game that we attended ended with a tie.

Even more important than the NFL game itself, it was a great tailgating test run for us. At the end of November, an even larger group of us will be heading a few minutes south to The Game.

Pics are up.